外刊总结_2018.3.1经济学人_学历军备竞赛

Governments are keen on higher education, seeing it as a means to boost social mobility and economic growth, but they tend to overestimate the benefits and ignore the costs of expanding university education. The graduate premium, the increase in earnings that graduates enjoy over non-graduates, is a flawed unit of reckoning. With degrees so common, recruiters are using them as a crude way to screen applicants, and non-graduates are increasingly locked out of decent work. Furthermore, a third of university entrants never graduate, and the weakest students who are drawn in as higher education expands are most likely to drop out. Therefore, governments need to offer the young a wider range of options after school, rethinking their own hiring practices, seeking other ways for non-graduates to prove they have the right skills, and giving school-leavers a wider variety of ways to gain vocational skills and to demonstrate their employability in the private sector. Such measures would be more efficient at developing the skills that boost productivity and save public money.